A syntax option (function types versus arrays)

[Alex Blewitt]

On 11 Mar 2010, at 08:52, Jakob Praher wrote:

> Gernot Neppert schrieb:
>> Why not go all the way to:
>> 
>> lambda...
> IMHO: It is far better to prefix the types with some letters than with a #.

OK, I'll point out the obvious. any 'some letters' are currently a valid identifier in Java, and you can't guarantee that there's no-one in the world who hasn't used the identifier 'lambda' before. So pretty much any construct needs to be either one of the unused keywords in the existing Java language spec (e.g. goto) or something that currently isn't semantically correct in an existing Java program as an identifier (hence the #).  That's not to say that necessarily # has to be the only other choice, but introducing a new keyword based on existing (potentially common) words is likely to cause issues.

Alex